The Startup Velocity Question: What Hinders Acceleration in VC Funded Companies?

I have been running 1Mby1M since 2010. I find myself saying to entrepreneurs ad nauseam that VCs want to invest in startups that can go from zero to $100 million in revenue in 5 to 7 years.

Startups that do not have what it takes to achieve velocity should not be venture funded.

Experienced VCs, over time, have developed heuristics to gauge what constitutes a high growth venture investment thesis. 

1Mby1M Udemy Courses with Sramana Mitra: Bootstrapping

Over the course of two years, we have released over 70 courses on Udemy with the aim to democratize entrepreneurship education at scale globally. This series of posts aims to help you find the one you need easily and provide you with discount coupons.

Serial Entrepreneur Zack Rinat on Model N (Part 1)

Zack Rinat is currently CEO and founder of Model N. He was a member of the 1995 founding team of NetDynamics.

SM: Let’s start by going over where you grew up, where you were educated, and your early background.

ZR: I am an Israeli, born and raised in Israel. Like every Israeli I had to serve in the military, so I spent four years in the service. I was in the Special Forces.

SM: Did you have to fight?

ZR: I was a company commander, and yes we had to do some crazy things. I was in the military for four years and then I felt I needed to regain my youth so I went backpacking throughout South America for a whole year. I came back to Israel and got the degree from the Israel campus of IIT. >>>

Featured Videos

Making SMEs Run Smoothly: René Lacerte’s Cashview (Part 1)

René Lacerte is the founder and CEO of Cashview, a Web-based cash management solution delivered as a SaaS. Prior to Cashview, René founded PayCycle, which I covered recently. In this interview, we will trace the thinking of a serial entrepreneur who brings substantial SME and SaaS expertise to the table.

SM: René, I would like to start by reviewing your background. Where are you from, where did you grow up and where do your entrepreneurial roots come from?

RL: I come from four generations of entrepreneurs. My great grandfather had a couple of general stores, and my grandfather had seven businesses. His first was trading fish with [North American] Indians when he was teaching English to the Indians in northern Canada. He was using his salary to buy and trade fish. >>>

Speeding Up the Internet: Algorithms Guru and Akamai Founder Tom Leighton (Part 1)

Tom Leighton, co-founder of Akamai, is the Chief Scientist and a member of the Board of Director at Akamai. You can read more about him by visiting his bio here. Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM) is the leading content delivery network (CDN) provider which, among other things, allows content providers to accelerate the delivery of Internet content and applications. In the past, I have addressed how Akamai stands to benefit from the online video surge, as well as how the actions of the Telco’s cost reduction could potentially impact Akamai. Here I talk with Tom about these issues, and more.

SM: Tom, I would like to start the conversation with some questions about your background.

TL: I grew up in Arlington, Virginia. I attended public schools there and then went to college at Princeton. I came to MIT for graduate school and got my PhD, after which I did a Post Doc here and stayed on as a professor of mathematics.

SM: Your field of research is primarily algorithms, correct?

TL: That is correct. I was interested in algorithms used on large-scale networks, and my core field of research was graph theory as applied to network optimization algorithms. >>>

Cracking the Very Small Business Market: PayCycle CEO Jim Heeger (Part 1)

For years, I have looked at the small business market as an opportunity that technology vendors need to attack. For years, however, the common wisdom in the venture circles have been that it is much too difficult to sell to small businesses. With the advent and popularity of Software-As-A-Service (SaaS), this sentiment has started changing. In this series, I will be speaking with Jim Heeger, CEO of PayCycle, a company that has mastered the art of selling payroll services to very small businesses.

Jim, in particular, is an authority in this discipline of building businesses around value propositions offered to small business customers. Before PayCycle, he ran Adobe’s Creative Professional Suite business. Jim also spent a number of years at Intuit running various pieces of Intuit’s accounting software business, also focused on small businesses.

My intent in bringing you this series (and subsequent ones on the topic) is that it would give you ideas on how to market and sell to this vast, untapped set of customers.

SM: Jim, I would like to start this interview with some background which explains where you are coming from. I know you have been involved in some very small business oriented plays which were vastly un-sexy until recently.

>>>

Venky Harinarayan on Kosmix and Vertical Search (Part 1)

Someone asked me earlier about Kosmix in one of the discussions on this blog, and I had said that I hadn’t looked at the company yet. Well, now I have, and I am happy to bring you a conversation with Venky Harinarayan on the genesis and direction of vertical search startup, Kosmix.

SM: Please describe your personal background.

VH: My journey starts in Bombay where I was born and then spent most of my childhood and youth in Madras. I was born into a family of doctors and businesspeople. One of my grandfathers was a medic in World War II during which he was captured by the Japanese and escaped after spending two weeks in the jungles of Burma. My other grandfather was the managing director of Automobile Products of India, a leading auto manufacturer in the country.

My father was an entrepreneur which is no trivial task in India. Unlike the United States, entrepreneurs in India at the time had to put up all of the money for their company with no outside financing at all. Also, government regulations and bureaucracy made running an enterprise very tough. My mother was the central point of our lives and a very strong influence on me and my sister. As a trivial aside, she was a childhood playmate of Salman Rushdie, and is relieved she was not mentioned in “Midnight’s Children.” >>>

TeleWebSales: A Methodology Discussion with Anneke Seley (Part 1)

Anneke Seley is the CEO and founder of Phone Works, which creates teams and processes to help companies maximize their Inside Sales. Telesales, and the combination of Telesales with Websales, is creating a new selling methodology that I have referred to as TeleWebSales. Phone Works is one of top consultants in this space and to date has created over 250 sales teams for their clients.

I first met Anneke in 1999, when I was doing Intarka, my lead generation startup, which I talked about during the Umberto Milletti story.

This discussion is going focus on the various pieces involved in building a repeatable sales process.

I just want to get this straight, a repeatable sales (and marketing) process is incredibly important. If you ever want to build a company that is of any scale, you need a process that builds a sales funnel, and manages to move leads along the funnel, and convert them to deals.

So with the introduction, Anneke and I invite you to spend a couple of weeks with us in the depths if sales methodology. >>>

Yaniv Ben-Saadon, CEO of FixYa: Using the Social Web for Technical Support (Part 1)

How often have you bought a new DVD Player, and have had difficulty making it work with your existing TV set-up? In our Entrepreneurship Case Studies series, this week, we talk with Yaniv Ben-Saadon, founder and CEO of Fixya, a community site focused on providing after sales technical support on consumer products.

SM: Please describe your personal background : Family, upbringing, early career, etc. leading up to this venture.

YB: I was born and raised in Jerusalem, Israel; the oldest of three children to young parents that immigrated from Morocco. After graduating tech high school, I joint the Israeli Air Force and became an officer soon after that. Overall I served 6 years in the military, and in 1994 jumped on a plane and came to the US. >>>

Sharat Sharan’s On24: Lead Generation Through WebCasting (Part 1)

SM: Please describe your personal background : Family, upbringing, early career, etc. leading up to this venture.

SS: I grew up in New Delhi, India and my dad was a senior military officer. We had a lot of change every two years as we moved from place to place. This taught me how to make new friends and how to adapt to survive in a way.

I got my BS in electrical engineering and had an opportunity in 1984 to go to the best management school in India or go to the US for graduate studies in computer science. I decided to go to the US, where I got my Masters degree in Computer Science from Virginia Tech.

After graduate school – around 1986, I started at Online Computer Systems, a software start-up focused on CD-ROM based systems. This was when the beginning of the information revolution and Online Computer Systems was a leading player. Reed Elsevier eventually acquired the company. >>>

Innovation in Sales Prospecting: InsideView CEO Umberto Milletti (Part 1)

While we have been revising the Enterprise 3.0 definition, and introducing sales methodology into the framework, I thought it would be a good time to drill down into certain aspects of Sales, and explore some best practices. With that goal, I first bring you an interview with a company called InsideView that focuses on making sales prospecting and account / opportunity research efficient and repeatable.

Now, this is a somewhat unsettling piece for me to write. In 1997, I started Intarka with precisely this mission, and much of what we will be discussing in InsideView was part of Intarka’s ProspectMiner productline. However, the web has changed significantly, and various services like Jigsaw, LinkedIn, Spoke, etc. offer opportunities today for solving the same problem, that simply did not exist a decade ago. The web was still in its infancy, whereas today, it is at least a toddler.

With that background, let us start our conversation with Umberto Milletti. >>>

Eric Benhamou: The Saga Of Palm (Part 1)

In this second interview series with Eric Benhamou, we discuss his involvement with Palm. If you haven’t already, do read the first interview series for context [here]. As you know, Palm is in the midst of a great deal of change at the moment. However, it is an important company that established the PDA category, then led the SmartPhone movement. Somewhere along the way, however, things went wrong, and this interview with Eric would help us understand the history of Palm, and perhaps, assess its turnaround prospects on which I have written extensively. Overall, in the convergence device category, I still think Palm has a great opportunity ahead, IF they can clean up their act.

SM: We stopped at the point where Donna and Jeff had left 3Com. Later, the time came when you were ready to spin Palm off as a public company. So we can resume the discussion from there. What happened from that point on in terms of valuation and industry dynamics? What did you find waiting for you on the other end? EB: This all occurred at the peak of irrational exuberance. This was when NASDAQ went from 4,000 to 5,000 in a couple of months. In fact, at the time when we did the road show in February of 2000, NASDAQ was flirting with 5,000 – it was near record level. >>>